Works in Sensing and Feeling

In this talk, artist Constantina Zavitsanos speaks about their artistic practice. Zavitsanos’s work ranges from sculpture to performance, and deals with debt and dependency, entropy, thresholds of perception, incapacity, and modes of sensing and feeling. Zavitsanos’s work is deeply sensitive to the infrastructural possibilities and limitations of any exhibition environment. In their pieces, accessibility strategies are often also sculptural strategies or filmic gestures. Tools like open captions can offer, in the artist’s words, a “backstage pass” to previously unseen aspects of a work.

All the same, for Zavitsanos, obscurity is not necessarily to be avoided. In the artist’s work, debility is often simply a material condition, and Zavitsanos regularly engages materials at the point where they frustrate or challenge our perception. Experimenting with artistic production in relation to insights from physics, some of Zavitsanos’s past works consider what cannot be sensed, or engage phenomena of interference. The artist’s Call to Post & All the Time, on view in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, features an “infrasonic ramp,” a large inclining surface that vibrates with frequencies beyond the range of human hearing.

Zavitsanos’s practice unfolds both independently and, occasionally, in collaboration with others. Peers they have written with, performed with, or developed work with include Park McArthur, Carolyn Lazard, and Amalle Dublon.